First Ever-LRC Cooking Club

Tuesday of this week was the first class for students enrolled in the LRC Cooking Club. 

When when advertising the Cooking Club, that there was a lot of interest from grade 12 students. These student will soon be leaving home for university.  Cooking is a very important life skill, one that they will need in their lives as university students and adults. 

The students were very enthusiastic during the first class where they learned how to make an omelet. Initially, they had to deal with a few challenges such as learning to dice vegetables,  but they soon  got the hang of it. By the end students were very pleased to have learned how to cook a very healthy omelet for their breakfast.

Cooking Club helps students to develop in many different ways including:

• providing enjoyable learning experiences that focus on important life skills

• providing opportunities for children to improve their food preparation skills

• teaching children healthy nutrition practices in an enjoyable manner

• giving children the opportunity to learn about foods from different cultures

• providing opportunities for collaboration

• enhancing community partnerships around the issue of child health

• encouraging food security through promotion of affordable meal and snack ideas.

*Each week, students are given a list of ingredients and quantities to purchase for the following class.
**During lessons students will have to follow the LRC cooking class safety rules at all times.

DVA 2019

This year's we are celebrating the ABC DVA's 10th anniversary!

How time has flown since our first practice run in September of 2009!

The DVA is and has always been about celebrating and sharing outstanding audio video work by the students for the students, as well as the entire ABC community (campus and extended). That said, over the past three years DVA has opened the doors to other schools in the local community. This year's DVA includes submissions from Acton Academy in both Primary and Secondary categories.

DVA has grown incrementally in both scope and length over the years to the point where the decision was made to run it as two events.
As a result, this year's DVA will run over 2 nights instead of the traditional one night event, with Secondary launching the events on February 12th and Primary closing DVA on February 13th.

Over the years, the ABC DVA has gained recognition internationally, as well as nationally through the regular sharing of this important work through community outreach and conferences such as Library and Classroom 2.0, Winter STEAM Conference, the ISTE Conference and local events.

One of the greatest impacts DVA has had over these past 10 years however is the growth of a culture of  creation through which all  students have opportunities to learn new skills, apply them across situations and subjects and share their work with audiences in the community.

Voting opens this coming Friday the 1st of February and closes at 6pm on Sunday the 3rd.

Please go to our official DVA Website and our various DVA Flickr Galleries to learn more. 

Mercado de creadores: en el camino a STEAM Fest

Maker Market es el primer paso en el camino hacia STEAM Fest!

Cada estudiante participante de nuestra escuela y los invitados de otras instituciones, se inscribieron en un stand de mercado de fabricantes donde expusieron y vendieron sus productos creativos e innovadores. 

Dentro de sus productos se encontraban lapiceros decorados, llaveros, galletas, chocobananos, macetas con materiales reciclados reutilizables para las plantas suculentas, objetos diseñados con lápiz 3D, Slime, entre otros.

También participaron los alumnos de octavo grado quienes pusieron en exhibición sus prototipos que diseñaron y elaboraron en clase de ICT como parte del Proyecto de Innovación, basado en las SDG's (Objetivos y metas de desarrollo sostenible)de las Naciones Unidas.

Todas las ganancias recolectados son para donación a su organización benéfica de cada grado y de esta manera poder compartir su brillantez con los demás y hacer la diferencias en las vidas de otras personas.

Fotos en Flickr 

Conferencia Bibliotecas Públicas 2018

Today a group of our student makers and librarians had the great honour of presenting at the Public Library Conference, which is taking place at the National Theatre in downtown San Salvador this week.

This conference runs over several days and brings together librarians from all over the country to engage in important discussions and share ideas.

Our presentation was a bit longer than we anticipated, but we were able to pack in everything we had planned on sharing.  We spoke first to the group about free,  innovation tools that everyone can access and use to document, promote and engage in creative, innovative design work in their libraries. We spoke about the various projects that run through LRC, including support of school activities and events, theme weeks and department liaisons.  We also took the opportunity to offer useful tips, and a resource bank for those interested in building creative initiatives in their institutions.

The highlight of the presentation however, for much of the audience and for us as members of staff, came about halfway through when  our students stood up to speak about their social impact projects. The audience was blown away by the thought and initiative that students employed in designing and implementing their projects. They were decidedly impressed, just as we are, by the dedication and passion they demonstrated about their work supporting the  UN SDGs.   This is the second time the students have presented this work, the first being the recent Library 2.0 Social Crisis online conference.


It is truly inspiring to work with these students as they actively search out opportunities, invest heavily of their time and effort, and engage themselves both emotionally and academically in the practical implementation of their school values, in their quests to think globally and act locally.

Here is the link to the photos on Flickr including a short tutorial for attendees on how to build plastic bag sleeping mats for the homeless. 

Library 2.018: Social Crisis Management in a 21st Century World

Today we were privileged to present alongside our wonderful students at the Library 2.018: Social Crisis Management in a 21st Century World online conference. This is just one of the many conferences hosted by Library 2.0 and its global network of educators and librarians. Each year the LRC staff members participate as presenters in a minimum of one Library 2.0 conference per year. We also regularly present and attend conferences nationally and internationally, online and in person, because we believe in the value of sharing ideas and learning together as a collaborative global community.

This particular session however is definitely one of the most exciting ones we have every done. This session was presented not only by LRC Staff members, but by a selection of our students, who work every day to make a difference in their community and other communities around the country. 

There is little akin to the satisfaction gained in observing your students share their innovation  projects and discuss the personal and social importance of the initiatives they are passionate about. 

At 2:20 Wednesday afternoon we all piled into the recording studio and began rotating through all of our presenters young and not so young.  

 The session lasted just under 30 minutes and  is now available online if you would like to listen in as the kids share the ways in which  they are making a difference locally,  with an actual global audience of educators and interested parties.

This is the link to the recording in case you get a chance.

(Apologies in advance to native Spanish speakers for my special Spanish introduction. I promise that once you get into the main presentation you will be glad you did.)

 I can't say enough about how proud we are of our students, their projects, their passion for positive change and the way the handled themselves today.

Continued Community Outreach

Over the years, it has become commonplace to see hosted groups of administrators, teachers and librarians as well as students of these disciplines touring the LRC. Using technology, we have been able to further expand these tours and engage in discussions and shared practices as far away as Malaysia and up and down the Americas. These are always meaningful, reciprocal learning experiences for everyone involved. We look forward to them and always come away with that greater sense of community and the satisfaction that accompanies the sharing of ideas and practices with like minded educators.

The LRC staff members were recently invited to participate in a video conference with students at the University of Costa Rica enrolled in the BI-5017 Marketing of Services and Products for Educational Information course along with their professor Daniela Rodríguez. The purpose of this virtual meetup was to address questions the students had on the specific challenges faced by libraries in different countries. 

On September 13th, we hosted the class of student librarians via Google Hangouts. During this time we examined the challenges facing libraries, talked about marketing strategies and gave them a tour of the LRC facilities.

We ran this virtual session via Google Hangouts as it allowed us to go mobile on our various cell phones and a laptop. This technique worked really well as we were all able to not only converse with the group but also tour them around the facilities and in doing so pop in and out of the conversation as it developed. 

We spent an hour and a half with this class, during this time we also shared ideas for the development of learning resources centres, special projects, and purchasing ideas for equipment and resource. We shared the way we organised our print library as well as the virtual library and its functions and finished up with a complete tour of the facilities. The beauty of this type of meetup is natural flow of conversation punctuated by concrete examples and poignant Q and A.

The professor in charge wrote to us the following day to thank us for coming into her classroom the evening before and working with her students. We in turn were thankful for the opportunity to do so. There is so much scope for work like this. It costs next to nothing to beam a group in via the internet and collaborate. We do it with our students in lessons, why shouldn't we collaborate through web conferences with professionals at other institutions as well. All it takes is a few people who are not afraid of taking a risk and are willing to use the technology most of us carry around with us on a daily basis.

Possibly the most powerful aspects of videoconferencing between institutions and countries are the conversations that result and the links that are forged. Through this activity we were not only able share our spaces, but to discuss matter of concern for libraries and librarians everywhere. We would be thrilled to hold more of these virtual meetups in future. We'll keep the updates coming.

Jen and the Librarians

¡YA LLEGARON LAS REVISTAS EN LÍNEA!

Dentro de las nuevas adquisiciones en este año escolar tenemos dos nuevas revistas en línea muy interesantes, BBC Focus es sobre ciencia y tecnología y la revista New Internationalist cubre temas sociales y ambientales.

Para leerlas sólo debes seguir estos pasos:

1- Ir al enlace https://reader.exacteditions.com/
2- Click en "library card"
3- Ingresar el código: 20182019